… the ACLU has long warned that the real purpose of the NCTC (National Counterterrorism Center) – despite its nominal focus on terrorism – is the “massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States”.

In particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes “records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records” – “literally anything the government collects would be fair game”. In other words, the NCTC – now vested with the power to determine the proper “disposition” of terrorist suspects – is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens.

Worse still, as the ACLU’s legislative counsel Chris Calabrese documented back in July in a must-read analysis, Obama officials very recently abolished safeguards on how this information can be used. Whereas the agency, during the Bush years, was barred from storing non-terrorist-related information about innocent Americans for more than 180 days – a limit which “meant that NCTC was dissuaded from collecting large databases filled with information on innocent Americans” – it is now free to do so. Obama officials eliminated this constraint by authorizing the NCTC “to collect and ‘continually assess’ information on innocent Americans for up to five years”.

Also, be sure to watch the 8 min video at the link below, that’s intro to a film in the making:

The video says the National Security Agency is building the country’s biggest data storage facility with the capacity to store 100 years’ worth of the world’s electronic communications. They can then do data-mining on these “legally” collected data, with software that automatically build complete profiles of everyone’s life, collected over time, precisely the kinds of things that the Gastapo, the KGB, and the Stazi would have loved to have on their citizens.

By Robert D. McFadden

Russell C. Means, the charismatic Oglala Sioux who helped revive the warrior image of the American Indian in the 1970s with guerrilla-tactic protests that called attention to the nation’s history of injustices against its indigenous peoples, died on Monday at his ranch in Porcupine, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He was 72.

The cause was esophageal cancer, which had spread recently to his tongue, lymph nodes and lungs, said Glenn Morris, Mr. Means’s legal representative. Told in the summer of 2011 that the cancer was inoperable, Mr. Means had already resolved to shun mainstream medical treatments in favor of herbal and other native remedies.

Strapping, and ruggedly handsome in buckskins, with a scarred face, piercing dark eyes and raven braids that dangled to the waist, Mr. Means was, by his own account, a magnet for trouble — addicted to drugs and alcohol in his early years and later arrested repeatedly in violent clashes with rivals and the law. He was tried for abetting a murder, shot several times, stabbed once and imprisoned for a year for rioting.

He styled himself a throwback to ancestors who resisted the westward expansion of the American frontier. With theatrical protests that brought national attention to poverty and discrimination suffered by his people, he became arguably the nation’s best-known Indian since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

But critics, including many Indians, called him a tireless self-promoter who capitalized on his angry-rebel notoriety by running quixotic races for the presidency and the governorship of New Mexico, by acting in dozens of movies — notably in a principal role in “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992) — and by writing and recording music commercially with Indian warrior and heritage themes.

He rose to national attention as a leader of the American Indian Movement in 1970 by directing a band of Indian protesters who seized the Mayflower II ship replica at Plymouth, Mass., on Thanksgiving Day. The boisterous confrontation between Indians and costumed “Pilgrims” attracted network television coverage and made Mr. Means an overnight hero to dissident Indians and sympathetic whites.

Later, he orchestrated an Indian prayer vigil atop the federal monument of sculptured presidential heads at Mount Rushmore, S.D., to dramatize Lakota claims to Black Hills land. In 1972, he organized cross-country caravans converging on Washington to protest a century of broken treaties, and led an occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He also attacked the “Chief Wahoo” mascot of the Cleveland Indians baseball team, a toothy Indian caricature that he called racist and demeaning. It is still used.

And in a 1973 protest covered by the national news media for months, he led hundreds of Indians and white sympathizers in an occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D., site of the 1890 massacre of some 350 Lakota men, women and children in the last major conflict of the American Indian wars. The protesters demanded strict federal adherence to old Indian treaties, and an end to what they called corrupt tribal governments.

In the ensuing 71-day standoff with federal agents, thousands of shots were fired, two Indians were killed and an agent was paralyzed. Mr. Means and his fellow protest leader Dennis Banks were charged with assault, larceny and conspiracy. But after a long federal trial in Minnesota in 1974, with the defense raising current and historic Indian grievances, the case was dismissed by a judge for prosecutorial misconduct.

Mr. Means later faced other legal battles. In 1976, he was acquitted in a jury trial in Rapid City, S.D., of abetting a murder in a barroom brawl. Wanted on six warrants in two states, he was convicted of involvement in a 1974 riot during a clash between the police and Indian activists outside a Sioux Falls, S.D., courthouse. He served a year in a state prison, where he was stabbed by another inmate.

Mr. Means also survived several gunshots — one in the abdomen fired during a scuffle with an Indian Affairs police officer in North Dakota in 1975, one that grazed his forehead in what he called a drive-by assassination attempt on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975, and one in the chest fired by another would-be assassin on another South Dakota reservation in 1976.

Undeterred, he led a caravan of Sioux and Cheyenne into a gathering of 500 people commemorating the centennial of Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn in Montana in 1876, the nation’s most famous defeat of the Indian wars. To pounding drums, Mr. Means and his followers mounted a speaker’s platform, joined hands and did a victory dance, sung in Sioux Lakota, titled “Custer Died for Your Sins.”

Russell Charles Means was born on the Pine Ridge reservation on Nov. 10, 1939, the oldest of four sons of Harold and Theodora Feather Means. The Anglo-Saxon surname was that of a great-grandfather. When he was 3, the family moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where his father, a welder and auto mechanic, worked in wartime shipyards.

Russell attended public schools in Vallejo and San Leandro High School, where he faced racial taunts, had poor grades and barely graduated in 1958. He drifted into delinquency, drugs, alcoholism and street fights. He also attended four colleges, including Arizona State at Tempe, but did not earn a degree. For much of the 1960s he rambled about the West, working as a janitor, printer, cowboy and dance instructor.

In 1969, he took a job with the Rosebud Sioux tribal council in South Dakota. Within months he moved to Cleveland and became founding director of a government-financed center helping Indians adapt to urban life. He also met Mr. Banks, who had recently co-founded the American Indian Movement. In 1970, Mr. Means became the movement’s national director, and over the next decade his actions made him a household name.

In 1985 and 1986, he went to Nicaragua to support indigenous Miskito Indians whose autonomy was threatened by the leftist Sandinista government. He reported Sandinista atrocities against the Indians and urged the Reagan administration to aid the victims. Millions in aid went to some anti-Sandinista groups, but a leader of the Miskito Indian rebels, Brooklyn Rivera, said his followers had not received any of that aid.

In 1987, Mr. Means ran for president. He sought the Libertarian Party nomination but lost to Ron Paul, a former and future congressman from Texas. In 2002, Mr. Means campaigned independently for the New Mexico governorship but was barred procedurally from the ballot.

Mr. Means retired from the American Indian Movement in 1988, but its leaders, with whom he had feuded for years, scoffed, saying he had “retired” six times previously. They generally disowned him and his work, calling him an opportunist out for political and financial gain. In 1989, he told Congress that there was “rampant graft and corruption” in tribal governments and federal programs assisting American Indians.

Mr. Means began his acting career in 1992 with “The Last of the Mohicans,” Michael Mann’s adaptation of the James Fenimore Cooper novel, in which he played Chingachgook opposite Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe. Over two decades he appeared in more than 30 films and television productions, including “Natural Born Killers” (1994) and “Pathfinder” (2007). He also recorded CDs, including “Electric Warrior: The Sound of Indian America” (1993), and wrote a memoir, “Where White Men Fear to Tread” (1995, with Marvin J. Wolf).

He was married and divorced four times and had nine children. He also adopted many others following Lakota tradition. His fifth marriage, to Pearl Daniels, was in 1999, and she survives him.

Mr. Means cut off his braids a few months before receiving his cancer diagnosis. It was, he said in an interview last October, a gesture of mourning for his people. In Lakota lore, he explained, the hair holds memories, and mourners often cut it to release those memories, and the people in them, to the spirit world.

The Ministry of Hydrocarbons has disrespected the internationally recognized rights of indigenous peoples in its actions towards the Sapara Nation of Ecuador.

On August 30, 73 delegates representing Sapara communities held an assembly and democratically voted to reject all oil activities in Sapara territories. Next month, the Ministry of Hydrocarbons will carry out oil exploration in Sapara territory, directly violating the Sapara’s rights to self-determination.

The Sapara Nation of Ecuador was declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2001. The new oil boom will have a direct impact on Sapara territory, threatening the Sapara’s integrity, life, and culture. The Ministry of Hydrocarbon’s presence in Sapara territory is already causing social divisions.

Furthermore, oil exploration violates the Rights of Nature as enshrined in the 2008 Ecuadorian Constitution.

We demand respect for our rights as enshrined in our constitution and international treaties. Furthermore, we warn the Secretary of Hydrocarbons that Executive Order 1247, which issues the implementation of free, prior, and informed “consultation” in areas that the government has already decided to convert into oil blocks, is illegal and unconstitutional. Furthermore, the Secretary of Hydrocarbons has not held consultations with the democratically elected Governing Council of the Sapara Nation of Ecuador, therefore disrespecting our nation’s traditional government structures.

We state that the Sapara will not be held liable for any damages in our territory as a result of oil exploration. We are obligated to carry out our own ancestral forms of justice and state that the ordinary court systems cannot become involved in our decision making processes, considering that the state has not taken any actions to help resolve the social conflicts in our territories.

The announcements for the exploration of block 86 in Sapara territory, as reported by the national government spokesmen, will lead to serious abuses and offenses, and lead to conflicts with amongst Sapara families. Therefore, we are under maximum alert: Sapara territory must not be recognized as individual blocks, we are a single Sapara Nation and single territory.

Oil only represents death, social conflicts, and poverty. Development via the extractive industries is a myth. We affirm that oil development in the central south of the Ecuadorian Amazon will not lead to sustainable economic investment in the country. Some studies and indicators even show that the oil reserves in the central south of the Ecuadorian Amazon are low grade and will likely yield low profits. We cannot “bet” on potentially low grade oil reserves and create an environmental travesty of our Naku IKICHAKA—living forest.

We would like to tell the national government and the citizens of our country that Ecuador has the greatest biodiversity in the world, in addition to cultural diversity and oral history. The future of humanity is in biodiversity; 80% of medicines come from plants, animals and organisms of tropical forests. By not deforesting the vasts acres of land in the central south of the Ecuadorian Amazon, we can avoid emitting 212 million tons of C02.

We declare ourselves in permanent alert. We are children of Aritiawkus, and we have the knowledge of Naku—the forest—which is the abode of the spirits and grandparents who taught us to live in harmony and with respect to nature. Here, we have developed another way of life, one without oil.

SAPARA AN INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE OF HUMANITY
GOVERNING COUNCIL OF THE SAPARA NATION OF ECUADOR

Groups with unity flourish and those without unity are destroyed and replaced by those who have it.

Traditional armies gain unity through isolation, ritualized obedience, and through coercive measures applied to dissenters up to and including death.

Groups who do not have techniques of unity derived from solidarity and common cause will be dominated by groups with coercive unity.

In the end it is the techniques of unity that dominate our civilization. Unified groups grow and multiply. Groups which lack unity imperil themselves and their allies.

It doesn’t matter what principles a group espouses. If it is not able to demonstrate basic unity it will be dominated by alliances that do.

When a group grows large the public press becomes a medium through which the group talks to itself. This gives the public press influence over the groups self-awareness. The public press has its agendas. So do insiders who speak to it.

For large groups, group insiders who interface with the public press are able to lever themselves into a position of internal influence via press influence.

Because Anonymous is anonymous, those who obtain this or other forms of leadership influence can be secretly decapitated and replaced by other interests.

This is exactly what happened in the Sabu affair. An important part of Anonymous ended up being controlled by the FBI. The cooption of its most visible figure, Sabu, was then used to entrap others.

FBI agents or informers have subsequently run entrapment operations against WikiLeaks presenting as figures from Anonymous.

According to FBI indictments the FBI has at various times controlled Anonymous servers. We must assume that currently a substantial number of Anonymous servers and “leadership” figures are compromised. This doesn’t mean Anonymous should be paralyzed by paranoia. But it must recognize the reality of infiltration. The promotion of “anonhosting.biz” and similar assets which are indistinguishable from an entrapment operations must not be tolerated.

The strength of Anonymous was not having leadership or other targetable assets. When each person has little influence over the whole, and no assets have special significance, compromise operations are expensive and ineffective. The cryptography used in Friends of WikiLeaks is based on this principle while WikiLeaks as an organization has a well tested public leadership cohort in order to prevent covert leadership replacement.

Assets create patronage and conflict around asset control. This includes virtual assets such as servers, Twitter accounts and IRC channels.

The question Anonymous must ask is does it want to be a mere gang (“expect us”) or a movement of solidarity. A movement of solidarity obtains its unity through common value and through the symbolic celebration of individuals whose actions strive towards common virtues.

Assessing the statement by “@AnonymousIRC”.

In relation to alleged associates of WikiLeaks. It is rarely in an alleged associates interest, especially early in a case, for us to be seen to be helping them or endorsing them. Such actions can be used as evidence against them. It raises the prestige stakes for prosecutors who are likely to use these alleged associates in a public proxy war against WikiLeaks. We do not publicly campaign for alleged associates until we know their legal team approves and our private actions must remain private. This calculous should be obvious.

Several weeks ago, WikiLeaks began a US election related donations campaign which expires on election day, Nov 6.

Torrents, unaffected even by this pop-up remain available from the front page.

These details should have been clearer but were available to anyone who cared to read. The exact logic and number of seconds are in the page source. We are time and resource constrained. We have many battles to deal with. Other than adding a line of clarification, we have not changed the campaign and nor do we intend to.

We know it is annoying. It is meant to be annoying. It is there to remind you that the prospective destruction of WikiLeaks by an unlawful financial blockade and an array of military, intelligence, DoJ and FBI investigations, and associated court cases is a serious business.

WikiLeaks faces unprecedented costs due to involvement in over 12 concurrent legal matters around the world, including our litigation of the US military in the Bradley Manning case. Our FBI file as of the start of the year had grown to 42,135 pages.

US officials stated to Australian diplomats the the investigation into WikiLeaks is of “unprecedented scale and nature”. Our people are routinely detained. Our editor was imprisoned, placed under house arrest for 18 months, and is now encircled in an embassy in London where he has been formally granted political asylum. Our people and associates are routinely pressured by the FBI to become informers against our leadership.

Since late 2010 we have been under an unlawful financial blockade. The blockade was found to be unlawful in the Icelandic courts, but the credit companies have appealed to the Supreme Court. Actions in other jurisdictions are in progress, including a European Commission investigation which has been going for over a year.

Despite this we have won every publishing battle and prevailed over every threat. Last month the Pentagon reissued its demands for us to cease publication of military materials and to cease “soliciting” US military sources. We will prevail there also, not because we are adept, although we are, but because to do so is a virtue that creates common cause.

Every year, tropical forests equivalent to the size of the Netherlands are cleared in South America to make room for the cultivation of soy, even though the monocultures have already assumed unimaginable proportions: In Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, the genetically modified soy bean and corn variants of a single producer – the US corporation Monsanto – grow on 45 million hectares.

Monsanto’s chemists have made the plants’ genetic make-up immune to Roundup, Monsanto’s proprietary, non-selective herbicide. The active ingredient is glyphosate, a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide. While Monsanto’s patented beans survive the sprayings, all other vegetation dies.

Since the plantations are edging ever closer to human settlements, people living there become ill and even die from the sprayed poisons. Animals, the soil, rivers and the drinking water are being contaminated with Monsanto’s toxic cocktail as well. Scientists draw a connection between the use of Roundup and the worldwide decline in amphibians.

But nature is fighting back: On GMO plantations, wild herbs and insects that have evolved a resistance against the toxins are making inroads. Experts are not surprised, for this is the inevitable consequence of a perverse system that works against the principles of nature. In response, increasing quantities of ever more poisonous chemicals are being sprayed.

A great majority of people in the European Union opposes the genetic modification of our food – and yet for most of us, it is an invisible guest at our dinner tables. European chickens, pigs and cows are fed with 35 million tons of imported GMO soy made by Monsanto.

TO SIGN ON to the EU petition petition to demand an import ban on genetically modified animal feed into the European Union:CLICK HERE

Wednesday, October 17 heads of state, government ministers and join the 11th Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biodiversity in Hyderabad (India) and Delphine Batho, Minister of Ecology, will chair the French delegation. Two years after the adoption of the Nagoya Protocol, the erosion of biodiversity is not ready to be stopped or even slowed, despite the commitments announced at the last Conference, hailed as a success too fast UN multilateralism. Since then, only six countries have ratified the Protocol. And such ratification is still not on the agenda of the European Union.

In Hyderabad, the question of financing the protection of biodiversity, it was agreed that “a substantial increase” is back on the table. But neither the amount nor the origin or how to recueilir these funds to protect biodiversity in the poorest countries – which are often among the richest in that area have been fixed. As for the climate, donor countries reduce their financing. Debt strengthens the refusal to take the ecological debt owed by the richest countries, and austerity policies not only cause social dramas and undermine democracy, but a barrier to ecological transition.

According to the preparatory documents for the Conference of Hyderabad, the protection of biodiversity require “innovative financial instruments”. Like the carbon markets for the climate, which have yet demonstrated their failure, it would be to generalize the banks and clearing markets and payments for ecosystem services. Biodiversity and delivered to private finance in defiance of the complexity, uniqueness and incommensurability of ecosystems, to the detriment of the rights of local populations and for the sole benefit of a few companies that can continue to pollute and destroy rob biodiversity.

At the opening session of the opening of the Conference, Indian Minister of Environment, Jayanthi Natarajan, has encouraged “to invest more to improve natural capital.” The European Union is one of the strongest proponents of this agenda. European Commissioner for the Environment has proposed to generalize the “natural capital accounting” and work with the European Investment Bank (EIB) to create financial instruments facilitating private investment in biodiversity. Thus reduced to a “natural capital”, biodiversity would be left to the decisions of financial markets and investors, for whom the biodiversity crisis is an opportunity and a new playground

In this logic then whose inefficiency and environmental dangers are already certified, including drift of carbon finance, we oppose the need for funding global public fueled particularly by global taxes. Preservation of biodiversity can only be effective by the drastic reduction of the ecological footprint of countries and peoples of the richest in the world, through regulatory measures preventing biopiracy amplified by the liberalization of patents on living organisms and the spoliation of TK. Attac France, in connection with European networks, opposes mechanisms financialization of nature: the risk of loss of biodiversity are not interested in free ecosystem services, but the refusal to engage in a real ecological transition.

Attac France, October 16, 2012

For a more detailed analysis of logical contributing to the financialization of nature and the introduction of nature in the capital cycle, see Attac France, Nature has no price, the mistakes of the green economy, ed. LLL, 2012.

By Brenda Norrell

The US Border Patrol has targeted the Tohono O’odham Nation with spy towers at 14 potential sites in three districts, according to a tribal resolution that opened the door for a massive network of US spy towers on tribal land.